Am currently in northern Thailand, where khao soi (pictured above) has been flowing through my veins for the last few days. Will follow up soon with exciting, action-packed dispatches from Lampang, Sukhothai and elsewhere…

Khun Manee is a respected maker of khao taen (pictured above), rice cakes that are deep-fried and drizzled with palm sugar, in Lampang, a city in northern Thailand that is known for the sweet.

To make khao taen, sticky rice (both the white and ‘black’ varieties) is steamed then mixed with watermelon juice. This gives the rice a slightly pink colour and sweet flavour. The still soft rice is then pressed into rings:

and the cakes are then left in the sun to dry, which I was told usually takes a couple days, depending on the weather:

When sufficiently dry, the cakes are deep-fried. Khun Manee does this herself:

The cakes puff up amazingly fast, and a batch is done in less than 15 seconds.

The rice cakes are allowed to cool, then they are drizzled with a mixture of warm palm sugar, sesame seeds and a tiny bit of salt:

Khao taen were probably the first Thai sweets I ever tried (I was a student in Chiang Mai where they’re also popular), and are still among my favourite, although I usually prefer the kind topped with sugarcane sugar. Nonetheless, I still downed a (rather large) bag of Khun Manee’s in 1 1/2 sittings.

It was at Lampang’s night market that I first came across look chin khiang, ‘cutting board meatballs’ (shown above). Several vendors were selling them, and just about everybody was eating them. Initially I was impressed by their size–roughly equivalent to a child’s fist. But I also really loved how they were served. After being grilled:

the gigantic meatballs were served with a steak knife, the porcine cutting board shown above, and a sweet bottled-tasting sauce. Unskewer, cut, dip and eat.

The above is a camera obscura image of Wat Phra That Lampang Luang, a 700-year old temple compound outside the northern Thai city of Lampang. On the grounds of this temple is tiny elevated room with a small hole in the door. A white sheet hangs inside, and the light projected through the hole creates the (upside down) image shown at the top. For some reason, women are not allowed in this particular part of the temple.

I put my camera on a tripod and used a 15 second exposure (at ISO 400, f/4.5) to get the pic at the top. Would be fun to put a piece of photographic paper in place of the sheet; I’ll bet the colours and textures would result in a fascinating image, perhaps something like this:

I’ve been in northern Thailand for two weeks now, but Lampang is as far north as I’ve made it. As one goes further south within phaak nuea (northern Thailand), the language, culture and food become more like those of central Thailand, so Lampang was really my only chance to get my hands on good, authentic northern-style Thai food.

Luckily it’s a pretty good place to do this. There aren’t too many restaurant serving local food, but the city’s night market is terrific, although everything is take-away only. Luckily the folks at Riverside Guest House were kind enough to let me use their dishes.

It was very wet when I was in Lampang, and the market had lots of rainy season goodies such as bamboo:

and mushrooms:

Typical of northern Thai markets are the pre-portioned bundles of veggies and herbs for the various soups and curries. The one below is to make kaeng khae, the famous northern Thai herb-laden soup:

This woman made one of the best kaeng hangleh (a Burmese-style pork curry) I’ve had:

And the pic at the top of the post? The chilies, garlic and shallots will be peeled then pounded up with fish sauce to make naam phrik num, the famous northern Thai chili ‘dip’.

A performer waiting to go onstage at a likay performance, Kamphaeng Phet.

While in Kamphaeng Phet I was lucky enough to come across a performance of likay. Lucky because there’s not a whole lot to do in Kamphaeng Phet and also because likay is incredibly photogenic. Likay is, (taking from the upcoming Lonely Planet Bangkok) ‘a colourful mixture of folk and classical music, outrageous costumes, melodrama, slapstick comedy, sexual innuendo and sociopolitical commentary’. It’s quite a bit like ngiw, the Chinese drama which I’ve shown here previously.

The light was very irregular and it was at night, so I shot everything at ISO 800, the first time I’ve really shot that high with any of my cameras. The results seem to have come out OK, with less noise than I expected, and I actually kinda like the contrasty, saturated look of the images. I didn’t get too many pics of the actual performance, as I found the backstage action a lot more interesting.

Several months’ work has finally taken a tangible form. Lonely Planet’s Bangkok, which I co-authored with Andrew Burke, and Thailand’s Islands & Beaches, of which I wrote several chapters including Food, have finally been printed.